Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet 29

by Edited by Kelly Link

them, chattering

  irrational

  vocalisations instead

  of thoughts

  She’s been putting

  on weight, too

  Jupiter: that’s too

  bad

  A is A: she almost

  wouldn’t let me take

  the car.

  Jupiter: If you need

  to put it off, we could

  do it some other

  time :P

  A is A: no, I stuck to

  my guns. It is

  important to do that

  sometimes.

  I have to be true to

  my individual will.

  And my individual

  will is to meet with

  you and share

  myself.

  You deserve it.

  Jupiter: :)

  A is A: Don’t use

  emoticons.

  It is beneath you.

  Jupiter: Ok.

  I feel like irrational pulp sometimes.

  And I look skinnier on the internet, so I won’t eat dinner tonight, then when he is here and I’m SAY IT naked, there’ll be less of a belly. And maybe he won’t care because he said he was really looking for a mind like mine but he also says he loved that I am a dancer. Maybe it will be great, though.

  I do want to. Sally has a tally. I don’t want to catch up, but I don’t want to be laughed at, just because I’ve only ever had one guy and she had him first, and he really liked her more.

  I’d prefer maybe to just talk to this guy but it might as well be him, right? Maybe he’s amazing. Maybe I’ll like it. Maybe I deserve it.

  It is one-thirty A.M. and I am hungry and can’t sleep and when I think about how in 200 years people will transcend their physical bodies it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea so I eat cheese and then it does feel like a bad idea.

  If the moon were made of cheese, it would slowly grate itself away as it dragged against the surface of the earth, and leave a giant puddle of melted goo in Death Valley in the middle of the day.

  It isn’t made of cheese, though. We will all die of astrogeological trauma and it will be my fault.

  He is thirty-six. He looks okay in the picture he sent me. Like, not actually attractive, but if it’s a meeting of minds I could be attracted to minds. He is thirty-six and he will be arriving by car and he has taken time off from his job in Arizona to come here. It is odd that he is arriving by car because I don’t have to meet him somewhere, he will just suddenly be here at about eleven. A home-delivered man. He might as well be dropped here by aliens, and how do I know he wasn’t?

  Well, no, I know him. We have been talking for two months. He wrote a sci fi book, and I want to write movies, so, you know. He understands that people are crap. That they don’t act rationally. He says it is possible to swim up through the strata of scum and find oxygen at the top. He thinks I’m special. Maybe I am, but maybe he’ll change his mind when he sees me. Eleven is still a hours away. I feel fat and I go and make a cup of that laxative tea that Mom doesn’t know I know she has, but then I worry it will make something bad happen when he gets there so I don’t drink it, but I do go and try to shit. Nothing happens.

  VOLCANOS MAKE YOU SHIT

  I don’t understand you sometimes.

  THEY GO TO THE BEACH

  We aren’t up to that yet. He still isn’t here. I hope when he does get here he doesn’t want to immediately—of course there is a chance he will never make it—hope he doesn’t want to immediately SAY IT have sex. Fuck. We didn’t specifically say we would at all, but people don’t say, do they? It just happens.

  Of course there is a chance he will never make it. Maybe war has broken out between Massachusetts and New York State, and maybe he won’t be able to get across the border or he’ll get deported as an illegal immigrant or even imprisoned as a traitor. And then he could write to me from jail; that would be okay

  He arrives at 11.04. He gets out of the car, and he is wearing a suit and he is shorter than I expected, but he has floppy hair like in the photo. I had looked at the photos for a while online and thought maybe in real life it would be better, and here he is and it is different but it is not better or worse. He has pale blue eyes, which do look nice. His floppy hair has some gray and is slightly balding on top.

  He says: “You are even more beautiful in person,” and he kisses me on the cheek. FATTIE. Then he asks me where the bathroom is. He carries his case in and I show him, and he asks me how I’ve been, and I say I’ve just been bored hanging around the house, and he asks do I want to go for a drive, and that sounds ok to me, so I grab my beanie and coat and scarf and we head out to the car.

  He says: “Let’s go to the beach.”

  While we are driving he tells me about his book, which mostly he has already told me about on the internet but he fills in more detail. The book is set in a future country where all taxation has been outlawed and there is no government intervention, he says. He gets pretty enthusiastic about this. It’s like the perfect world, he says. I don’t understand how that would work but I don’t want to sound stupid so I keep quiet.

  So everything is going well in this perfect place, but suddenly a cadre of—let me get this right—“maniacal ivory tower academics” somehow seize control of the country and start threatening to tax things and spend the money on the undeserving. The normal armed forces of the country are incapacitated somehow, and so it falls to one lone accountant/entrepreneur with a gun to set things right.

  “What’s the accountant’s name?” I ask.

  “Midas Henry.”

  “Huh,” I say. “He has the same initials as you.” I remember that Marshall sold his accounting business a while ago.

  “Well,” says, “I didn’t want to spell it out. But you have to protect the individual from the ravages of society, and I do my part when I can.”

  So he’s a protagonist. I wonder what that’s like.

  THEY GO TO THE BEACH

  Thanks, All Caps. Anyway, we arrive at the beach. Look, I wrote a screenplay about it:

  EXT. Crane Beach, MAS.

  MARSHALL’s car pulls up in the empty parking lot, and JANE and Marshall get out. It is windy and bitterly cold. Marshall is wearing a long down jacket over his suit. He appears very happy to be here, but Jane less so. He leads her down to the snow covered beach.

  Marshall

  This is amazing weather!

  Jane

  I guess so.

  Marshall stares out towards the sea for a while. The wind cuts at both of their faces with sand and snow.

  Marshall

  I feel like this sometimes, like a lone figure in a landscape. The only one who is brave enough to stand there and look at all the beauty.

  Are people afraid of your beauty, Jane?

  He does not look at her when he says this.

  FOUR HOURS LATER (at least, that’s what it feels like)

  They have wandered along the shore for a while and have come across the left-overs from a sculpture festival. Marshall is staring at the statue. Jane is shivering, and moving around to keep warm. She trips over a snow hillock, then picks herself back up again.

  Marshall

  It’s a classical beauty, just like you. It has that line, you know. I really want to see you dance, one day.

  Jane

  I’ll dedicate all my choreography to you. If we can go somewhere warm.

  Marshall

  Tell me you love me.

  Jane’s nose is running and red from the cold. She looks exhausted.

  Jane

  I love you. Can we go to dinner?

  Wait a second, let me do another draft of that.

  OK

  Ext. Crane Beach, MA

  It is a beautiful summer’s day. MARSHALL’s car pulls into the last spot in the crowded parking lot. JANE and Marshall emerge. He’s wearing a T-shirt, and she is wearing a summer dress which shows off her perfectly flat stomach. They are both wearing sunglasses.

>   They stroll down toward the beach. Marshall buys them both ice cream and they survey the throng playing on the sand and in the surf.

  Marshall

  Look at all these meat-bots.

  Suddenly we see that the sea is receding. It disappears almost to the horizon. Jane and Marshall both realise at the same instant (well, her first) what this means. They are the only ones smart enough to understand. The crowd on the beach seems oblivious.

  A child wanders far out onto the sand, looking at the tiny creatures that have been left behind by the ocean’s sudden retreat.

  Jane gasps and starts moving toward the child.

  Jane

  The children—

  Marshall (restraining her)

  No, Jane. You’re more important. The survival of the individualist’s will must trump all other concerns! Run!

  They flee.

  Close-up of an ice cream dropped in the sand.

  The wave appears over the horizon, and it is indeed the children who are hit first, followed by the rest of the throngs on the beach. The wave comes in at ankle then knee level, but is soon an unending, unstoppable torrent that none can stand against.

  They run valiantly, and make it to the car, but there is no outrunning the wave. They find themselves thrown around in an epic rinse cycle, no clue which way is up, the car slowly filling with water. The entire town is swept away, never to be seen again.

  We go to dinner. He takes me to a nice place a little way from the beach. I’m really really hungry by this point and I order the chicken with gravy and peas. He starts talking about his book again, except this time he’s talking about publishers being dinosaurs and something something self-publishing wave of the future something something free market. Then he gets a message on his phone and he smiles. “Liz just had sex with her boyfriend,” he says. “Look, it’s getting dark, maybe we should get a hotel room.”

  IT IS DARK FROM THE BEES

  I imagine that the reason it is getting dark is because the outside of the windows to the restaurant are slowly becoming covered in bees. Millions and millions of bees. They’ve come back, all the bees we have lost. And they don’t want to sting us all to death. But they will if they have to.

  “I would really like to go back home,” I say. “I don’t feel safe in this area.”

  He sighs loudly, but acquiesces.

  There is a long drive back home. Mostly we don’t talk. I’m glad we ate first. When we see the sign for Lowell that means we are exactly ten miles from my town he puts his hand on my leg and starts to rub it gently. I keep still.

  When we get there we get out of the car and head straight inside and I suppose it is time. He comes into my room and kisses me, and we start making out. But unbeknownst to us, just as we are doing this there is a huge asteroid entering the atmosphere, and it hurtles and burns and shrinks as it descends towards North America, towards Massachusetts, towards Lowell, until it is the size of a basketball, and it pierces my roof at supersonic speed, and just as he is starting to say to me “I want us to . . .” it hits him in the side of the head. The head itself is torn clean off and travels onward with the asteroid for another nanosecond, stuck like a bug in a truck’s grill, before it is reduced to component lumps of irrational pulp in the asteroid’s final impact. And I feel bad about that, but I don’t have time keep feeling bad because the asteroid is just one of many and some of them are carrying alien spores, and we humanity must spend the next twenty years fighting off the invasion. It was a shame he died, but we have to look forward, to the future. To our survival.

  THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN

  Shut up, All Caps. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I think of these things. We start making out, and it is okay I guess. Nothing much happens but we end up on the bed and he takes his shirt off, so I take mine off because it seems like the thing to do. We end up naked and after more kissing and touching he starts trying to finger me but I really don’t want that so I move his hand away. He asks to put a condom on and I say okay and then I let him enter me.

  He is on top of me for a while and I’m getting claustrophobic, but it doesn’t hurt, and I’m starting to feel something, but then he pulls back away from me and says “I want us to come together” I WANT US TO COME TOGETHER

  I WANT US TO COME TOGETHER

  I WANT US TO COME

  I WANT fucking hell, All Caps, stop it. So I say “I need to be on top for that,” so we kind of roll over and he slips out accidentally. I get on top of him and there’s a few minutes where he fumbles around and I have to wait for him to put himself back in. He doesn’t seem as hard, and after I start moving he slips out pretty soon, and I put him back inside me again, but a minute or two later he slips out and he’s totally soft and he says he wants to keep going somehow but I ask if we can stop.

  He puts his arm out and I lay down next to him.

  “Has sex been hard recently?” he asks. “Is it the Celexa?”

  He thinks that my antidepressants are the reason that I did not enjoy this.

  He starts nuzzling me.

  I lie perfectly still.

  He says: “Do you want to masturbate together?”

  No. “No.”

  There is a pause and then he asks: “Do you want to watch me masturbate?”

  Shit no, fuck no, god no, NO. “No.”

  “Okay, okay.” He seems annoyed at me. “You don’t have to be so vehement.”

  INTIMACY INTIMACY I try to placate him:

  “It’s too much intimacy. It’s too intense.”

  “Ah.”

  The All Caps have shown me the way to get by. I wake up before him, and I have time to get a T-shirt and pants on before he reaches for me.

  “Good morning, my love,” he says.

  “Good morning,” I say, without looking at him.

  He sits up in bed and looks at me expectantly. “Why are you out there for?” he says.

  “It’s just a bit . . . overwhelming,” I say.

  He seems to take this as a compliment.

  From then on, every time he wants X I say that it is just “too intense”, that I cannot handle this level of “intimacy,” and he slows down and steps back with an understanding, sympathetic, and patronising look on his face.

  He is here for one more night, that is what we have arranged, and I really don’t want to look at or have to touch his “intimacy” again so I suggest we go out, and we do and we go shopping and then we see a movie and get something to eat, and he has a lot to say about all of these things, especially the political agenda of the movie, and I am pretty sure that a week ago if I had read what he was saying in a chat window on my screen I would have thought it was pretty clever, but right now I am unsure. How come this guy gets to be a protagonist? I want to be the protagonist.

  We get home and I decide the protagonist (me) doesn’t have to please people all of the time, so I say straight out that I do not feel like having sex that night. He doesn’t say anything really, but he talks a lot about taxes and I wear pyjamas in the night and he holds me and I get up early with pins and needles in one arm and then I make breakfast and when he gets up he asks me about my dreams and I make something up about crumbling tax-free utopias full of zombies and I don’t feel bad about it.

  It is time for him to leave. We are standing outside my house and he has his stuff in the car already and he holds my hands in his and looks into my eyes and I’m almost scared because I think maybe he sees me for a second, but then he says:

  “Promise me you won’t have sex with anybody else without discussing it with me first.”

  “Okay,” I say without thinking. Is this how you say goodbye?

  And then he’s gone and from then on I try to avoid him on the internet, but I read his blog and it says that I love him and want to dedicate all my choreography to him, and two and a half weeks later he sends me an email saying he is leaving Liz and that he has quit his job and then he says he wants to come live with me, and I tell him no, and that I have slept with someone e
lse. He tells me that I’m a bad person, and suddenly it doesn’t seem like such a big deal that YOU ARE A BAD PERSON people might think that. It doesn’t seem like a big deal even when the All Caps letters say it. There are worse things than not being nice.

  Because maybe I am the protagonist after all, or even the writer, and if I decide that there is an asteroid out there piloted by a race of alien bees, maybe there is. And if I think that asteroid might impact with the moon, maybe it will. And if I imagine that the impact breaks the moon into pieces, and one of the pieces swoops lower and lower in a spiralling orbit until it clips the top of a wooden telegraph pole in Boston and one of the giant splinters pierces none other than Bert right through his penis at high speed so that he never again has anything that my mother is interested in, maybe that will happen too. And then the unstoppable chunk of moon will grind into the earth in a tighter and tighter spiral, not stopping its destructive circumnavigation until the world is divided into two halves, with me on one side and Marshall Harrington on the other.